“California’s plan to integrate the West Coast grid is a great idea – that could easily backfire,” MIT Technology Review

A bill gaining momentum in the California legislature would set the stage for the integration of the electricity grid across the West Coast, aiming to achieve these very ends. But some legal experts fear it would have precisely the opposite effect: loosening the state’s grip over its own grid, and with it the ability to enforce some of the nation’s strictest clean-energy policies.

That danger is especially acute under the Trump administration. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees grid operators, is working to “actively distort energy markets to punish states taking steps to prioritize clean energy,” says Danny Cullenward, an energy economist, lawyer, and researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

(On Thursday, he and a co-author posted a new paper, set for publication in Yale Journal on Regulation Bulletin this fall, highlighting the risks of such recent actions by FERC and several regional market operators.)